Thanks, but I'm not seeing anything particularly relevant, just one thread about audio:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=571199

Perhaps you could point me to something specific? So far all my experiments in Vegas have looked quite poor.

Creating PAL and NTSC output

Simple PAL >NTSC from original PAL DVD?

Editing Pal 25p with NTSC 30p

There are dozens and dozens more, but I am tired of doing this. If you don't find your answer, just do a search for "NTSC PAL" and restrict the search to this forum, over all time, and just the subject line. I got over 900 results, from which I extracted the links above.

I did plough through lots of similar links. What I was looking for was a recommendation of some sort of magic bullet, but that doesn't appear to exist. It looks like a question of living with one type of artefact or another, with varying degrees of intrusion.

Clearly Vegas isn't a high-quality converter with any combination of settings, not to my eyes anyway.

If it was me, i'd disable resampling. That means that every 5th PAL frame will be doubled to produce NTSC frames 5 & 6. This will retain the image sharpness and avoid the ghosting at the expense of cadence. I find that a very acceptable tradeoff. Your mileage may vary.

Most feature films use exactly this same procedure when converted to NTSC TV, except the ratio there is 4:5 instead of 5:6. Watch an old movie on VHS or DVD in slow motion or frame advance and you'll see frames like this: 1 2 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 12 ... etc. But at normal speed you don't even notice it. Converting PAL to NTSC should be even less jarring since it's every 5th frame doubled instead of every 4th.

I assume you've tried changing the de-interlace method to Interpolate, that might fix your ghosting problem although you'd loose some resolution compared to Merge.
Having said that I did an NTSC DVD of some sports footage only a few weeks ago and it looked pretty good to me. I've had fairly critical eyes look at the converted output from Vegas and they've been quite impressed.
However I did do one conversion that looked rather tragic and I'm still not 100% certain why but the original source was film. What I should have been able to do was a field merge to get back the 25p, done a speed change to 24p and added pulldown to get 60i and it should have looked great but I could see straight away that wasn't going to work because the results of the field merge was interlace combing on motion.
I think I might know what was wrong. The field order was correct, the field cadence was wrong and I'm not certain how to fix this even now.

Aside from all of the above, have you had an actual quote from a post house with an S&W box. The things do cost a bundle, there's units made by people other than S&W (Leitch, Terranex) that do a very good job and large networks have lots of them as every international feed arrives in the host nations format i.e. PAL <> NTSC real time conversion is very common.

Bob.